Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. Author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), The Unexplained (1996), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003), and more recently Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013), A Manifestation of Monsters (2015), Here's Nessie! (2016), and what is already considered to be his magnum opus, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016), his many fans have been badgering him to join the blogosphere for years. The CFZ Blog Network is proud to have finally persuaded him to do so.

Search This Blog

PLEASE COME IN, I'VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU...

Monday, 31 July 2017

A PICTURE OF MONKEY BUSINESS - OR, HOW A SMALL FURRY PET BECAME A GIANT MYSTERY APE. PART 2: THE TRUE HISTORY OF AMERANTHROPOIDES LOYSI

The
uncropped version of Dr François de Loys's photograph of the supposed South
American ape Ameranthropoides loysi – one of the most controversial
cryptozoological images of all time (public domain)

Welcome to my
600th post on ShukerNature! Befitting of such a momentous occasion,
the subject documented by me in this post is of profound cryptozoological
significance – revealing how one of the most infamous mystery beast frauds of
all time was finally exposed. In Part 1 (click here) of this two-part ShukerNature article, I
documented the 'official' history of a truly extraordinary mystery creature - a
supposedly genuine, tailless, bipedal South American ape, reputedly encountered
and killed in the Venezuelan jungle almost exactly a century ago by a team of
geologists led by one Dr François de Loys, and subsequently dubbed Ameranthropoides
loysi ('Loys's American ape') by a radical French zoologist called Prof.
George Montandon who held very extreme, controversial views concerning human
evolution. Now it's time to document this creature's true history, by presenting
the crucial yet all-too-long-overlooked information that conclusively exposed
the entire Ameranthropoides episode as a blatant, deliberate hoax.

The 'official'
history of Ameranthropoides loysi began to unravel on 16 July 1962. This was when the Caracas, Venezuela,
newspaper El Universal's historian Guillermo José Schael published in
the paper a telegram lately received from the village of Casigua, in the Tarra
River region of Venezuela, concerning a supposed giant spider that had
allegedly strangled to death a ranch worker named Juancho. Not surprisingly,
this dramatic news attracted considerable interest from readers, and elicited a
letter from a hunter named Jerónimo Martínez-Mendoza, which was published on 18
July by El Universal.

In it,
Martínez-Mendoza suggested that the report was mistaken, that it had probably
been a giant spider monkey which had attacked and killed Juancho, and he drew
comparisons in his letter with the Ameranthropoides incident from 1917. This
letter was in turn read by Dr Enrique Tejera Guevara (1899-1980), a
Venezuelan-born friend of de Loys in the field (as well as a decorated tropical physician and
pathologist, ambassador, and minister in the Venezuelan government), who
lost no time in replying via a letter of his own, but which contained a truly
sensational disclosure.

Published in El
Universal on 19 July 1962, Dr Tejera's letter revealed that back on 11
March 1929 (mistakenly given as 1919 in the
newspaper-published version of his letter) he had attended a lecture at the
Academy of Sciences in Paris, France, given by Montandon concerning Ameranthropoides,
but that he had been very surprised to hear Montandon's claims about the
creature being a very tall, bipedal, tailless South American ape. Consequently,
at the end of the lecture Tejera had stood up, and, to a hushed audience, had
brusquely dismissed Montandon's claims as nonsense.

Tejera informed
them that he had actually been in the company of de Loys in 1917 when the
famous encounter with the two apes and the shooting of one of them had
supposedly taken place – but affirmed that no such encounter or shooting had in
fact occurred. Instead, the creature in the photograph was nothing more than de
Loys's own normal-sized pet marimonda spider monkey, which he had dubbed 'the
monkey-man', and whose tail had been amputated after it had become infected.
Moreover, after his pet spider monkey had later died, and again in the presence
of Tejera, de Loys had decided, as a joke, to take a photo of its body propped
upright and sitting on a crate.

And as the
climax of his dramatic exposé, Tejera proclaimed that it was this joke picture
that had subsequently become known as the now-infamous Ameranthropoides
'ape' photograph, thanks to Montandon, and which with Frankensteinian vigour
had swiftly raged out of its creator's control - until in order to preserve his
reputation as a serious scientist, a highly embarrassed de Loys, seeing no way
of extricating himself from this most unwelcome situation without looking very
foolish indeed, had thereby found himself unable to confess the truth.

Banana
trees (public domain)

But that was not
all. Far from being in an area of wild, uncharted jungle in peril from attacks
by Motilone Indians at the time when the photograph was taken as claimed by de
Loys, he and his party were actually in an oil exploration camp very close to
civilisation. Furthermore, there was vital, conclusive proof of this statement
contained in the uncropped version of the Ameranthropoides photograph,
yet which had been overlooked by everyone for decades, even after Tejera's
earth-shattering announcement in front of a shocked and stunned Montandon back in 1929.

The proof was
the presence in this picture of a banana crop on the opposite side of the river
from where the dead spider monkey was propped up and photographed. Banana trees
are of Asian and Australasian origin, they are not native to the New World, having been
introduced there by humans, and they can only grow near civilisation, not in
the wild jungle region of South America where de Loys
had averred that the photograph had been snapped. So the presence of banana
trees in that picture verified that it had been snapped in the former location,
not in the latter one that de Loys had alleged. This in turn also negates a claim
made by him that whilst supposedly in the remote jungle, no fewer than 17 of
his men had died due to the inhospitable conditions and the hostile Motilone
Indians (in reality, there is no independent confirmation of this). In
addition, Tejera revealed that rather than de Loys having led a single 4-year
expedition to the Tarra River region as so frequently claimed in subsequent
accounts of the Ameranthropoides case, he had instead led several much
shorter ones (Tejera even provided their respective specific dates), and rarely
beyond the perimeter of civilisation, as demonstrated, for instance, by the
presence of banana trees in the Ameranthropoides photo.

Having said
that, the portion of the photograph showing these trees is sufficiently blurred
for their conclusive identification to be somewhat tricky. Tejera was there
when the photo was taken, so obviously he could clearly discern their true
nature, but the evidence for them from the photo alone is less certain.
Happily, however, there is one additional aspect of this image that vindicates
his statement. In the lower right quadrant of the photo, alongside the monkey
in the foreground, a leafy shoot is present that is identifiable as a chopped-down
but now-regenerating banana tree (I have shown this to various friends who have
kept banana trees, and they have all affirmed that this shoot is indeed one). I
have arrowed it in the uncropped photo reproduced below.

In addition, an
aspect that, very surprisingly, seems not to have been considered previously is
that for a creature supposedly killed by a hail of bullets, it seems in the
photograph to be remarkably free of bullet holes or wounds, especially as it
was supposedly shot from the front, not from the back or side. This of course
is readily explained by the fact that, thanks to Tejera, we now know that the
creature wasn't an attacking ape that had been shot, it was merely a pet monkey
that had died of natural causes.

Equally, as the
photographed 'ape' specimen was merely a marimonda spider monkey after all, de
Loys's allegation that its dentition was different from that of spider monkeys
was clearly yet another falsehood. And no doubt his so-convenient explanation
of why the skull had not been retained for formal scientific examination (he
claimed that the camp cook had converted it into a salt container and that it
had then fallen apart), which of course would have readily identified its true
taxonomic nature and exposed his dentition claim as false, was also a blatant
lie. Little wonder, then, why de Loys was not able to escape from the web of
deceit that he had spun when carrying out his joke, and which had ultimately
and inextricably enveloped him.

But that was
still not everything. At least two years before penning to El Universal his devastating letter outing and condemning Montandon and the entire Ameranthropoides charade, Tejera had actually revealed all of
this to fellow medical practitioner Dr Raymond Fiasson, who had documented it
in his book Des Indiens et des Mouches: Dans les Llanos du Vénézuela
(1960). Yet this too had escaped attention from cryptozoologists and zoologists
alike. So also had a section included by American physical anthropologist Prof. Earnest
A. Hooton in his book Man's Poor Relations (1942) – a significant but
hitherto-overlooked snippet until French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal had rediscovered it in 2007 (during that same year, Michel had also been instrumental in bringing Fiasson's documentation to public notice).
Prof. Hooton had revealed that in late 1932, American geologist A. James
Durlacher had written to him announcing that in 1927 he had spoken to various
former members of de Loys's expeditions and had learnt from them that Ameranthropoides
had indeed merely been a marimonda spider monkey. Even more frustrating, in
2001 Spanish researchers Bernardo
Urbani, Dr Ángel L. Viloria, and Franco Urbani had presented much of
this key information in a paper published by the Venezuelan journalAnartia, Publicaciones
Ocasionales del Museo de Biologia de La Universidad del Zulia, in which
they had concluded that the Ameranthropoides saga was certainly a hoax –
but yet again, this revelation had somehow evaded widespread attention! (It is
even possible that Tejera's dramatic intervention at the end of Montandon's
lecture back in 1929 was subsequently documented in some French newspaper(s) and/or
periodical(s), but if so these too failed to attract any public notice and
still await rediscovery.)

Happily,
however, their skilful detective work uncovering this hoax was at last given
its long-deserved international attention when, in 2008, Bernardo Urbani and Dr Viloria
published all of their findings in book form – Ameranthropoides loysi
Montandon 1929: The History of a Primatological Fraud. The book's text was
presented in two separate languages, English and Spanish, and was fully
referenced, thus constituting the most comprehensive, and now-definitive, study
and exposé of the whole sorry Ameranthropoides saga.

One final point
to consider here, which I haven't seen mentioned before but which has intrigued
me for some time, is whether de Loys was at least partly inspired when setting
up his hoax photo by a very distinctive illustration that was still famous back
then, although much less so today.

In 1758, eminent
English naturalist and wildlife painter George Edwards wrote and illustrated Gleanings
of Natural History, an authoritative tome that would remain a major work on
that subject for well over a century. One of its illustrations was a
hand-coloured copper engraving by Edwards of a young orang utan, among the
first pictures ever prepared of this great ape, in which the orang utan was
portrayed sitting upright on a wooden bench holding a long tall wooden stick in
one hand. If this illustration is compared with the iconic Ameranthropoides
photo, a number of striking similarities can be seen, including the orientation
and/or form of the feet, limbs, facial expression, and even the stick (albeit
utilised for different purposes).

Comparison
of the Ameranthropoides loysi photograph with the George Edwards
illustration of an orang utan (public domain)

Consequently, as
Gleanings of Natural History was still well known during the early 20th
Century, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that de Loys had seen
Edwards's orang utan illustration in it and had elected to reconstruct it using
the dead spider monkey, but for practical purposes had transformed the stick
into a supporting prop in his photo.

Ameranthropoides
loysi
RIP...? Although this specific case was a fraud from beginning to end, it
should be noted that mystery animal researchers are well aware that large
ape-like creatures, walking bipedally and lacking tails, have been
frequently reported by natives and Western explorers alike from many parts of Central
and South America, where they are referred to locally and variously by such
names as the sisimite (in Belize), xipe (Nicaragua), shiru (Colombia), vasitri
(Venezuela), didi(Guyana), tarma (Peru), mono rey (Bolivia), caipora
and curupira (Brazil), and others too. Detailed documentation of such sightings
lies outside the scope of this present article, but one extremely noteworthy,
representative encounter occurred as recently as 1987, so is deserving of
inclusion here.

That was when
New York Botanical Gardens mycologist Gary Samuels was crouching down on the
forest floor in Guyana, investigating fungi. Looking up, he was very startled
to see a 5-ft-tall hairy ape-man, walking by at close range on its hind legs but
seemingly unaware of him as he stayed kneeling, concealed on the ground. This
remarkable entity, which uttered an occasional "hoo" cry as it passed
by him, was presumably a didi.

O
Curupira, by Brazilian painter Manoel Santiago, produced
in 1926 and depicting the mythical(?) red-haired man-beast of Brazil known as
the curupira (Wikipedia CC BY 4.0 licence)

Explorer Simon
Chapman's book, The Monster of the Madidi: Searching For the Giant Ape of
the Bolivian Jungle (2001), documented his search in Bolivia's Madidi
region for the mono rey. Although he failed to find it, his book does contain a
couple of tantalising snippets that were new to me. One was his claim that
until recently, a local Bolivian actually owned a pelt from a mono rey, which
was then purchased by "a gringo" (European) who took it home and sent
it (or samples from it) off for DNA analysis, but the results (if any) were
never revealed. No details were given in his book as to who the
"gringo" was, where he came from, or where he sent the pelt/samples.
The other snippet, which Chapman had apparently attempted unsuccessfully to
substantiate, was that a living mono rey had allegedly once been exhibited at
Bolivia's Santa Cruz Zoo! (This zoo is known in full as the Santa Cruz de la
Sierra Municipal Zoo to distinguish it from others.)

Also worthy of
note here is the existence of centuries-old carvings and statues depicting
large, tailless, ape-like beasts, found among the crumbling relics from
long-gone civilisations in various South American (and also Mexican)
localities. Just coincidence – or representations of genuine creatures? There
is even an unequivocally ape-like mask preserved at Chicago's Field Museum of
Natural History, which had been carved in stone by Costa Rica's Guetar Indians
and dates from 1200 to 1500 AD.

At one time, a major zoological stumbling block to accepting the
possibility that any such entities actually do exist today in Latin America was
the absence of fossil precedents. That all changed in 1995, however, with the
publication of a paper by American anthropologist Dr Walter Hartwig in the Journal
of Human Evolution, which documented the remains of a very sizeable
Pleistocene monkey discovered in the Lagoa Santa cave system of Minas Gerais in
southeastern Brazil. In fact, this large-bodied species had originally been
described as long ago as 1838, by Danish naturalist Peter Lund, who had
named the extinct species Protopithecus brasiliensis. However, later
publications concerning it had not examined the original fossils and had
underestimated this species' actual size. In his paper, however, Hartwig
rectified that error, and estimated that P. brasiliensis may well have
been more than twice as massive as any living New World monkey.

Just a year later, on 23 May 1996, Hartwig published a second Protopithecus
paper, this time in Nature and co-authored with Brazilian
palaeontologist Dr Castor Cartelle. In it, they described a near-complete
skeleton, which had been found in 1992 within Pleistocene cave deposits in
Brazil's 60-mile-long Toca da Boa Vista, the longest cave in the Southern
Hemisphere, located in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Intriguingly, this
skeleton combined a howler monkey-like vocal sac with a spider monkey-like
cranium, and sported a robust body with limbs adapted for brachiation
(arm-swinging locomotion), similar to both spider monkeys and woolly monkeys
(and also Old World gibbons).

The giant species represented by it, which would have weighed
around 50 lb (in comparison, a marimonda spider monkey weighs 13-23 lb), is now housed
within the spider monkey subfamily, Atelinae. Moreover, after detailed studies
it was considered sufficiently distinct from the earlier Protopithecus
material to warrant its reclassification as a new species (and genus) in its
own right, which in 2013 was formally christened Cartelles coimbrafilhoi
in a Journal of Human Evolution paper written by Drs Lauren B. Halenar
and Alfred L. Rosenberger.

Also found in that same cave and at the same time was a
near-complete skeleton of another, hitherto-unknown, species of giant
Pleistocene ateline monkey. In a Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, USA paper published on 25 June 1996, Cartelle and Hartwig duly christened this new species Caipora bambuiorum (after the caipora, a small, peccary-riding
humanoid entity in Brazilian Tupi-Guarani mythology),which would have
weighed around 45 lb in life.And in 2000, after co-leading a
palaeontological expedition to Toca de Boa Vista, Hartwig announced that
thousands of fossils, mostly from extinct mammals, had been unearthed there –
including the skull of a 55-lb giant spider monkey, over twice the size of any species
alive today.

So perhaps it is
premature after all to dismiss entirely the prospect that the Neotropical
(platyrrhine) primate lineage may indeed have evolved a larger, ape-like
representative via convergent evolution, one that occupies some of the
ecological niches filled in the Old World by the apes, and which still awaits
formal zoological discovery and recognition.

A very exciting
possibility if true, that's for sure!

Further
information concerning the history of Ameranthropoides loysi (including
evidence supporting the intriguing prospect that some additional photographs
taken by de Loys of his spider monkey in Ameranthropoides pose may also
exist - click herefor my examination of this possibility on ShukerNature too) can be found in my book Extraordinary Animals Revisited. It also features on its front cover a
colourised version of de Loys's notorious yet never-to-be-forgotten South
American 'ape' photograph – truly a cryptozoological icon, albeit for all the
wrong reasons.

Just found your site from a link in an MU article. Was looking through your posts because I wanted to ask about this picture as it has always fascinated me, so I was thrilled to find this post. Heading back to look through all the old posts on this awesome site....

SHUKERNATURE SURVIVAL

If you'd like to assist me in my ongoing crypto-investigations, even the smallest donation would be immensely appreciated. All donations are non-profit-making, going exclusively towards the updating/maintenance of my crypto-archives' source material and other necessities that enable me to continue researching and blogging my findings right here for you on ShukerNature. Thank you so much for your help! - Karl

ShukerNature Followers

Subscribe To

Contributors

DISCLAIMER

In Accordance with Title 17 USC Section 107, any copyright material on display here is under Fair Use without any claim of ownership or any profit accrued by the display. The Material herein is for non-profit educational or criticism puposes only. Notwithstanding the provisions of Sections 106 and 106a, the fair use of a copyrighted work including reproduction and distribution of said material as specified in that section, for purposes of education, news reporting, commentary or criticism, scholarship or research, to persons who have expressed a prior interest in receiving such material for such purposes, is NOT an infringement. Also: Unless stated otherwise, all illustrations in ShukerNature blog articles that are credited to a named copyright owner plus Wikipedia have been made available by the copyright owner and Wikipedia for third-person use under the conditions of the Creative Commons Licence. Should any copyright holder of any of the illustrations included on ShukerNature not wish those illustrations to be included here, please contact me and I shall of course remove them.

ATTRIBUTION

All original content on this blog is the exclusive copyright of Dr Karl Shuker, with all rights reserved by him, and must NOT be reproduced in any manner without his strict permission in writing.